Science Projects

“Fringe” and “The Mentalist.”

During the last episode of the first season of “Lost,” after the castaways had endured yet another near-death experience on their not quite deserted island, the loopy old survivalist known as Locke turned to the valiant doctor, Jack, and delivered his verdict. “You’re a man of science,” he said, with more than a trace of pity. The island was getting weird, the plot threads were getting tangled, and it was becoming clear that no mere scientist—let alone a casual TV viewer—could hope to make sense of it all.

“Lost” is scheduled to begin its fifth season on ABC early next year, and, in the meantime, J. J. Abrams, a creator and executive producer of the show, has a new project, on Fox: an F.B.I. drama called “Fringe,” which gives him a further chance to explore his mixed feelings about the scientific method. Another show, another ragtag bunch of seekers on a mysterious quest that involves an awful lot of running. In deference to the climate and the sensibilities of greater Boston, where “Fringe” is set, these characters are more thoroughly clothed than the ones in “Lost.” But the monomania is the same: all they want to know is what happens next.

“Fringe,” like “The X-Files” before it, sometimes seems like a sci-fi parody of a police procedural: the episodes usually start with a crime but end with nothing that resembles an ending. The heroine is an agent named Olivia Dunham, played by Anna Torv, whose flat face and wide-set eyes telegraph her open-mindedness. She’s neither credulous (like Mulder, from “The X-Files”) nor incredulous (like Scully); she’s just a hardworking Fed caught up in a ludicrous but rather enjoyable paranormal crime show. The series began in September, with a passenger on a flight to Boston injecting himself with what appeared to be insulin; the syringe actually contained a man-made virus that, within minutes, reduced the plane’s population to zero. The midair gore (the Parents Television Council called “Fringe” that week’s worst show, citing a vivid depiction of “instant, extreme, liquefactive necrosis”) was less spooky than the idea of the ghost plane gently touching down at Logan Airport, guided by computers that must have been slimeproof. Dunham needed help with the case, and, as so often happens at the F.B.I., the experts decided that the right man for the job was a mad scientist who had spent the better part of two decades in a mental institution; in keeping with common practice, the institution agreed to release the man, Walter Bishop, on the condition that his estranged son, Peter, keep an eye on him and give him his prescribed dose of two or three wordy rejoinders per scene. (Peter is played by Joshua Jackson, formerly of “Dawson’s Creek,” so this last stipulation was no obstacle.)

It turned out that the F.B.I. had noticed a pattern of strange events (known, rather disappointingly, as “the Pattern”) that seemed to be connected to something called Massive Dynamic, which is a sinister multinational corporation—not, despite what you may have guessed, a jam band. Unlike Locke from “Lost,” however, Bishop, played by John Noble, is an unbowed “man of science.” Every gruesome discovery provokes in him the same response: gaping mouth, narrowed eyes, and some variation on “We need to get this back to the lab.” He is a godless mystic, convinced that every freak phenomenon has a materialist explanation, that there are no coincidences. In short, he is the ideal “Fringe” viewer.

Since this is the show’s first season, each episode is also an audition, a plea for permission to continue. At the end of the pilot, Dunham’s boss, played by Lance Reddick (the straight-backed actor who portrayed Cedric Daniels on “The Wire”), gazed out at the civilian world and asked, “You see all these people going about their lives? No idea what’s happening around them—what they’re in the middle of?” He was talking to us, the viewers, promising us a season of mayhem.

The ruthless TV marketplace encourages writers and producers to cram the maximum number of cliffhangers and ominous portents into the early episodes; they can worry about how to resolve them all if their series gets renewed. Viewers of “Lost” have sometimes complained that the show, in later seasons, started to drag; a 2007 cover story in Entertainment Weekly asked, “Are the producers just screwing with us until the grand finale, stretching out story lines like taffy because they’re out of ideas?” (The answer: a provisional no.) “Fringe” has already passed its first test: Fox initially commissioned thirteen episodes, but last month the network announced that it had ordered nine more, for a complete first season.

Episodes of “Fringe” are designed to be more self-contained than episodes of “Lost”; it’s possible to enjoy the scientific scavenger hunts without knowing or caring much about the Pattern. In fact, the plots tend to be less memorable than the images: a hairless albino rat, bleeding from red eyes; a woman with a fast-forward pregnancy, giving birth to a baby who instantly grows old and dies. Inevitably, Bishop’s scientific explanations are at once outlandish and underwhelming. Early on, he claimed that his “synaptic-transfer system” would allow Dunham to read the thoughts of her ex, who may have been a traitor. “It’s not an exact science,” Bishop said, before preparing his probes and sensors. “It’s not even science,” his son added. Dunham just lay back in a mind-synchronization tank, closed her eyes, and waited: all she wants to know is what happens next.

“Fringe” is broadcast at 9 P.M. on Tuesdays. This means that its main competition is another quasi-scientific investigative drama, “The Mentalist,” on CBS; they are the season’s two most popular new shows among eighteen- to forty-nine-year-olds. Whereas “Fringe” seems self-conscious about the debt it owes to its science-fiction forebears, “The Mentalist” is cheerfully familiar: it’s an old-fashioned procedural starring Simon Baker as Patrick Jane, a fake psychic turned raffish consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation. Perhaps you have observed that there is already a TV show about a crime-solving fake psychic (“Pysch,” on USA). And perhaps you have noticed that “C.B.I.” sounds a lot like “C.S.I.” Happily, California has no law against sincere flattery.

The show is essentially a support system for Baker, a thirty-nine-year-old Australian actor with tousled blond hair, a sly but kind smile, a rumpled silk vest, and eyes like apostrophes. He’s so charming that his charm is itself a running joke. In his first scene, he surprises a grieving mother in her kitchen and says, softly, “My name is Patrick Jane. I’m here to help you. Would you like a cup of tea?” Of course she would.

His main supervisor—and, as nine out of ten fake psychics could tell you, his eventual love interest—is Teresa Lisbon, played by Robin Tunney, who was a glamorous screwup in a pair of pleasantly lurid teen movies from the nineteen-nineties, “Empire Records” and “The Craft.” On “The Mentalist,” she’s a brusque boss, with a small, down-turned mouth that she frequently employs for purposes of castigation. At the Palm Springs airport, she learns that a colleague needs to stop by the baggage carrousel, and she is not amused: “You checked luggage? What are you, on vacation?”

And what of the mentalist’s method? It turns out to be a combination of careful observation and advanced hunchology, which puts Patrick Jane squarely in the tradition of Adrian Monk (from “Monk”), Robert Goren (from “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”), and, for that matter, Sherlock Holmes. The camera often follows Jane’s line of vision, forcing us to notice what he notices, and the suspense comes less in figuring out a murderer’s identity than in watching Jane persuade a culprit to fess up, sometimes unwittingly. If he has an uncanny ability, it’s getting suspects to waive their right to counsel.

But the more Jane positions himself as a debunker the less he seems like one. A heroic detective is of necessity a kind of superhero, turning even the most bizarre murder into an open-and-shut case. This usually requires a series of happenstances that are indistinguishable from luck, or magic, and if we need some sort of mumbo-jumbo to help us forget that—well, the mumbo-jumbo of mentalism works as well as any other. When Jane performs a parlor trick at the station (he finds hidden car keys using a colleague’s unconscious physical cues), Teresa asks if she’s supposed to believe that he’s really a psychic. “Oh, no, no, no,” he says, unconvincingly. “This is all science.” ♦

The ace pilot leading Virgin Galactic’s billion-dollar quest to make commercial space travel a reality.

Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group united by historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter century.